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Of course sending an SMS via an attached phone or GSM modem using AT commands in PDU mode is fun . Sometimes you just want to send a plain text message from your application and you don’t want to bother with phones, SIM cards, data plans, PDU mode and so on.

In these cases the easiest solution would be to use an SMTP to SMS gateway. SMTP is the protocol used to send email (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). What such a gateway does:

is receive an email

look at the intended recipient

figure out a phone-number from/for that recipient

send the text of the email as an SMS to the recipient’s phone

You could send an SMS message this way using any SMTP library (they come with .NET, JDK and many open source libraries are available to do this from C or C++).

There is a really simple way to test this: just send an email from your email client.

As shown in an earlier post, the Data Coding Scheme (DCS) octet in the SMS PDU can be used to turn a regular text message into a flash message.

Another feature of SMS that is enabled through use of the DCS is the Message Waiting Indication:

When someone leaves you a voicemail, the voicemail system communicates with the SMSC to send your phone a special SMS message that turns on the little icon on your phone that indicates that you have a new voicemail.

When you listen to your voicemail, the voicemail system also communicates with the SMSC to send your phone a SMS message that turns the little icon off again.

Another use for SMS is configuring phones over the air (OTA). There are elaborate standard specifications written by the WAP Forum (now Open Mobile Alliance) and somewhat proprietary standards developed by Nokia and Ericsson.

Today I’ll show in detail how to send a bookmark according the Nokia / Ericsson specification. The specification is somewhat older, it dates from September 2001, but it seems almost all Nokia and many Ericsson devices still support this.

As I have been writing about EMS and WAP Push, I am sure your ask yourself: “Does my phone support this?”. Again we dig into the WURFL database and we see that WAP Push is widely supported, but EMS a little less so.

This is understandable, because WAP Push is a protocol used in MMS (or picture messaging). Since most phones nowadays are camera phones and support picture messaging, they’re very likely to support WAP Push.

Here is a list of devices that support EMS and/or WAP Push, according to WURFL: